Chris Baldick

What a range of meanings and perpetual pertinence has the story
of Prometheus!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'History'

Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various
preoccupations which we find at work in Frankenstein;
stories of doomed experimenters and obsessive chemists were
favourites with early nineteenth-century readers. In France
Balzac himself tried his hand at this kind of tale in his La
Recherche de l'Absolu (1834), in which the protagonist
Balthazar Claes, who has studied chemistry under Lavoisier,
encounters a Polish chemist who inspires him to search for 'the
Absolute' -- the single element to which all matter can be
reduced. The quest is of course fatal in its consequences,
especially for Claes's domestic peace, as his wife foresees. She
accuses Claes of regarding people merely as mechanisms animated
by electrical fluid, and warns him against the Pole: 'Did you
look at him closely? Only the tempter could have those yellow
eyes, blazing with the fire of Prometheus.' Claes's science is,
she warns, encroaching on God's power just as Satan had done in
his reckless pride.1

The more familiar home of such Frankensteinian themes, though,
lay in the European and American short-story tradition, where
the emergent sub-genres of horror story, science fiction, and
detective tale mingled productively in the early part of the
century. Many of the most impressive short stories of this
period are tales of transgression which show a particular
interest in production -- whether artistic, craft, or scientific
-- as an obsessive and self-destructive activity. The model for
most of these Romantic fables is of course {64} the Faust myth, but in these
versions the Faustian figure is radically modernized, his former
acquisition of merely abstract knowledge now rewritten as the
perfecting of productive technique.2 These stories are often also
explorations of the Romantic crisis of artistic identity,
self-reflexive fictions of creative aspiration and its
uncertainties. In many of the best tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann
and Nathaniel Hawthorne, artists of various kinds discover the
destructive and damning qualities of their own creations, which
typically develop autonomous powers and overwhelm their
creators. As we are not yet dealing with a conscious or clearly
defined 'science fiction' (the word 'scientist' itself does not
appear before 1834), the kind of creator-figure we find in these
stories is a peculiar mixture of artist, philosopher, craftsman,
and chemical experimenter. Through these versatile and
obsessive creators, Romantic story-tellers offered their own
artistic dilemmas as metaphors for the production and
reproduction of life in every domain from the sexual to the
industrial.

Given the then incipient division of art from technology,
Romantic authors could better subsume the full range of human
activity under their sense of the 'creative' by using a
conventional figure of creativity drawn from economically
retarded societies in which a cherished integration of
imagination and manual skill was still embodied in a single
person. This would seem to explain partly the strong Germanic
influence on the short-story tradition in the nineteenth
century, and why the protagonists in Hoffmann, Hawthorne, and
their imitators are so often skilled craftsmen; theirs are tales
of mystery in the archaic sense of 'mystery' as a skilled and
secretive trade. So we find in these stories a gallery or arcade
of watchmakers, jewellers, violin-makers, goldsmiths,
architects, opticians, and assorted experimenting doctors or
professors, all of them obsessively independent producers who
create marvels from their private researches, usually without
Mephistophelean assistance. These figures are, in short,
classical petty-bourgeois producers whose special knowledge and
skill have allowed them to become their own masters, answerable
to nobody and often feared by their fellow burghers.

What is repeatedly shown in these tales of transgression is how
the secret skill which makes the protagonist independent and
severs his social ties becomes an obsessional end in itself and
masters the {65} master. In particular, the pursuit of craft
skills to the point of artistic perfectionism is often shown --
especially by Hoffmann -- to stand in direct competition with
sexual love. Hoffmann's young protagonists typically find
themselves distracted from their fiancees by some delusion
associated with their work or that of their masters, in the same
pattern by which Victor Frankenstein neglects Elizabeth for his
workshop. This element of sublimating distraction is one of the
few original features of the tale most carefully preserved in
stage and film versions of Frankenstein; Victor as a kind
of secretive Bluebeard thus stands as one of the more popular
components from which the cliche of the Mad Scientist will be
constructed. The products of similarly obsessed creators in
Hoffmann and Hawthorne are often poisonous or otherwise
blighted, mocking the ideals of artistic perfectionism and
metaphorically revealing the blighting of the creator as he
seals himself off from the sources of life in other people.

Nathaniel's fiancee Clara in Hoffmann's 'The Sandman' takes the
experimenter's syndrome for granted when she writes to her
intended of his recent experiences:

The uncanny night-time activities with your father were no doubt
nothing more than secret alchemical experiments . . .
and your mother can hardly have been pleased about it, since a
lot of money was undoubtedly wasted and, moreover, as is always
supposed to be the case with such laboratory experimenters, your
father, altogether absorbed in the deceptive desire for higher
truth, would have become estranged from his family.3

True to the same pattern, Nathaniel is seduced away from the
devoted Clara by the sinister optician Coppola and by the charms
of Professor Spalanzini's perfect clockwork doll Olympia, with
whom he falls in love. Finally driven insane by a series of
delusions, Nathaniel almost kills Clara before leaping to his
death from a tower. Similarly the artist Berthold in 'The Jesuit
College at Glogau', who speaks of Iris art in terms of
Promethean struggle, finds his life divided sharply between his
obsessive work and his lore, and is suspected of killing his
wife and child to remove all distractions from his painting.
Councillor Krespel, who dismantles violins to discover their
secrets, throws his pregnant wife out of a window when she
interrupts his {66} music, and metonymically 'kills' his
daughter by dismantling a violin especially associated with
her.

The pattern of fatal oppositions between love and work is
repeated in a particularly fascinating story by Hoffmann, 'The
Mines at Falun' (1819), upon which Wagner once planned to base
an opera. The tale is a kind of Moby Dick in reverse: a
melancholic and introspective sailor, Elis Frobom, meets an old
miner and is ensnared by the attractions of subterranean life.
As in Melville's novel, the industry is endowed with a
metaphysical value beyond its financial rewards, and it is this
lure of higher aspirations which draws the protagonist on to his
eventual destruction.

Elis Frobom was almost terrified by the old man's words. 'What
are you advising me to do?' he cried. 'Am I to leave the
beautiful earth and the sunlit sky and go down into the dreadful
depths and burrow like a mole, grubbing for ores and minerals,
for the sake of vile profit?'

'People despise what they want to know nothing about!' the old
man cried angrily. 'Vile profit! As if the horrors perpetrated
on the face of the earth by trade and commerce were nobler than
the work of the miner, whose indefatigable industry opens up
nature's most secret treasure-houses. You speak of vile profit,
Elis Frobom! -- well, something higher than that might be
involved. If the blind mole burrows by blind instinct, it may be
that the eyes of man acquire more penetrating sight in the
deepest depths of the earth, until they can recognize in the
wonderful stones they find a reflection of that which is hidden
above the clouds. You know nothing about mining, Elis; let me
tell you about it.' (TH, 316)

As the old man describes the world of mining, Elis begins to
feel the charm of a world whose magic has been known to him from
earliest boyhood in strange and secret presentiments. They are
perhaps not so strange if we remember that he is being invited
to penetrate Mother Nature; and indeed that night Elis is
conquered in a dream by the huge and terrifying subterranean
'Queen' at the same time that he hears the voice of his dead
mother.

Repelled at first by the chasm of the open-cast mine and its
resemblance to Dante's Inferno, Elis bashfully falls in love
with Ulla, the daughter of a mine overseer, and becomes a miner
himself. But the mysterious old miner reappears to warn him that
the Prince of Metals jealously demands an exclusive devotion
with which Elis's love for Ulla conflicts. Other miners tell him
that the old man is the ghost of the bachelor Torbern, whose
understanding of 'the hidden powers which rule in the womb of
the earth' (TH, 329) had {67} transcended mere material
greed, but who had been killed in a collapse; his ghost recruits
miners in times of labour shortage and guides them to the best
veins of ore. When it appears that Ulla is accepting the
advances of a rich merchant, Elis rushes to the mine to devote
himself to it instead; in a vision, he discovers the richest
veins, and is clasped to the breast of the Queen. Ulla's
apparent betrayal turns out to have been staged by her father to
force a proposal from Elis, so their engagement can now go
ahead. In the midst of their bliss, though, Elis feels haunted
by his commitment to the Queen, while Ulla senses something
pulling him away from her as he raves about 'the paradise which
shone in the womb of the earth' (TH, 334). As the wedding
day nears, Elis's state improves, but on the nuptial morning he
sets off again to the mine to find, as a bridal gift, a
blood-red carbuncle which he has seen in a dream and which
reflects 'the heart of the Queen at the mid-point of the earth'
(where Lucifer is placed in Dante's Inferno) (TH, 335).
Elis is then killed in a landslide.

In this tale Hoffmann outlines, almost at the same time as Mary
Shelley, a series of Frankensteinian problems, most obviously a
complex involving the fusion of productive labour and sexual
obsession. As in Frankenstein, the hero is clearly
gripped by fantasies of his dead mother, and the tale is almost
too overtly a 'mine' for depth psychology. Yet, like other tales
of Hoffmann, it pursues the conflict between normal bonds of
affection and a professional 'mystery' which exacts a
single-minded devotion from its followers. It gives us not just
a Freudian nuptial trauma but an image of the world of work as a
rival to the sexual claims of the fiancee. Only when Elis hears
that there is more to mining than the mundane value of 'vile
profit' does he become embroiled in its fantasized appeal. Thus
it is suggested (as it is in Moby Dick, as we shall see)
that Elis's self-destruction follows from his aspiring beyond
the bourgeois safety of the balance-sheet, in ardent pursuit of
Nature's secrets. Hoffmann hints at a mysterious force of
attraction which entices young men into frantic labours
apparently unjustified by the simple market value of the ores
extracted. The brilliant gems and metals seen in Elis's visions
seem to reflect all his desires both sexual and spiritual, and
it is worth noting that although he starts by scorning vile
profit, his obsession is put in motion by the prospect of
marrying his overseer's daughter. Elis's industry is rewarded in
just this way by Ulla's father, so his frantic accumulation can
be seen as a means towards a {68} respectable end. At the close
of the tale, though, what seems to Ulla and her father to be a
means has become an end in itself. In this kind of concern with
the obsessional appeal of production, 'The Mines at Falun'
stands alongside Frankenstein as another remarkable
modern parable of the industrial condition.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his many fictional studies of
self-destructive artists, craftsmen, alchemists, and other
alienated producers, is clearly an imitator of Hoffmann,
although the American's tales show a more measured and
artistically finished quality. Often, as in 'The Artist of the
Beautiful', it is apparent that Hawthorne's central concern is
with the dilemmas of the Romantic artist, yet in this and in
many closely related tales he also brings into focus wider
questions of society, science, and solitude which are posed in
ways which are strikingly familiar to the reader of
Frankenstein. Hawthorne's stock figure in these
allegorical sketches is an isolated man whose mentality and
special pursuits tear him from the warmth of (usually female)
society until he hardens into a frozen or petrified monster.
Indeed, the protagonist of 'The Man of Adamant' literally turns
to stone after rejecting the sympathies of woman; conversely,
the 'monstrous egotism'4 of Roderick Elliston in 'Egotism,
or the Bosom Serpent' is finally cured by woman's love.
Hawthorne repeatedly plays upon a contrast between the human
warmth of domesticity and the self-defeating coldness and
abstraction of egotistical endeavour, as in 'The Ambitious
Guest' or 'The Christmas Banquet'. Similar patterns of
characterization are at work in the longer romances too: in the
prying heartlessness of Chillingworth in The Scarlet
Letter, and in Hollingsworth's pseudo-philanthropic egoism
in The Blithedale Romance.

Hollingsworth had a closer friend than ever you could be. And
this friend was the cold, spectral monster which he had himself
conjured up, and on which he was wasting all the warmth of his
heart, and of which, at last -- as these men of mighty purpose
so invariably do -- he had grown to be the bond-slave. It was
his philanthropic theory!5

Before this Frankensteinian narcissism destroys the warm-blooded
{69} Zenobia, she accuses Hollingsworth of being a monster and a
'cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of
mechanism'.6

Hawthorne's interests extend beyond the spectres conjured up by
egotism, to take in similarly alienated figures who are not just
heartless individualists but also producers in a more practical
sense: alchemists, artists, or both. 'The Artist of the
Beautiful' is unusual in the sympathy which Hawthorne extends to
its hero, the poetical watchmaker Owen Warlock; the tale is less
a critique of egotism than an indulgent self-examination of the
artist's predicament, but it is still worth noting how Hawthorne
makes Owen lose the girl Annie, as a result of his creative
obsession, to a more earthly blacksmith and suffer 'a sensation
of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached
the frozen solitudes around the pole' (STS, 253). Trying
to improve upon nature by manufacturing a butterfly-like
automaton, Owen cuts himself off from the blessings of truly
humanized nature. Appropriately it is Annie's child who finally
crushes Owen's painstakingly constructed model butterfly.

Owen's malign counterpart in Hawthorne is the physician
Rappaccini, whose exile from human sympathies fits more closely
the developing stereotype of the Mad Scientist: the hero
Giovanni is told by Professor Baglioni that Rappaccini 'cares
infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are
interesting to him only as subjects for some new
experiment.' (STS, 274.) In Hawthorne's works
clinical detachment of this kind is always a symptom of moral
disease. Rappaccini is not just a sinister experimenter, though,
but a creator whose works are fabricated on recognizably
Frankensteinian principles. The plants in his poisonous
artificial garden

would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of
artificialness indicating that there had been such commixture,
and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable species, that
the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous
offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil
mockery of beauty. They were probably the result of experiment,
which in one or two cases had succeeded in mingling plants
individually lovely into a compound possessing the questionable
and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth of the
garden. (STS, 283)

Taking individually beautiful components, as Victor Frankenstein
had done, Rappaccini has combined them to produce not an
abortive {70} Adam but a poisonous Garden of Eden, which
similarly exhibits the nature of the temperament behind its
creation. And for Rappaccini's crime it is his creature who
suffers: his daughter (and finest 'flower') Beatrice, who is
condemned to solitude by her poisonous constitution arid who
regards herself as a monster when she infects Giovanni.

Perhaps a more interesting figure among Hawthorne's deluded
creators is Aylmer in 'The Birthmark'. Like Owen Warlock and
like Frankenstein, Aylmer is a modern disciple of Albertus Magnus and a
latter-day rival to Pygmalion. Seeking to improve upon nature,
he attempts to correct the only blemish in his wife's otherwise
perfect beauty -- a hand-shaped birthmark which comes to
symbolize earthly imperfection in general. In this story too we
see 'the love of science . . . rival the 1ore of woman
in its depth and absorbing energy' (STS, 203). So strong
is the rivalry, in fact, that Aylmer's attempt to eradicate the
birthmark succeeds in killing his wife along with her supposed
blemish.

Several of these characteristics of heartless isolation and
abortive production are united in the most Frankensteinian
figure in Hawthorne's fiction, that of Ethan Brand. In his story
we can detect a significant shift from a Faustian to a Promethean model of
transgression. The legend which surrounds Brand in the tale
attributes to him the conjuring of a devil from the furnace of
his lime-kiln, but the activity which he and the devil are
alleged then to pursue is described as if it were a process of
production, 'the man and the fiend each laboring to frame the
image of some mode of guilt which could neither be atoned for
nor forgiven' (STS, 305). A lime-burner by trade, Ethan
is a maker, and a suitably Promethean one at that, as his fiery
surname hints. Although he is for a while led off on a fruitless
quest for the Unpardonable Sin, he finds it at last only by
making it. Hawthorne shows in Brand's project a familiar process
of dehumanization which is revealed at last to be a process of
transgressive production.

So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,
indeed, had withered, -- had contracted, -- had hardened, -- had
perished! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He
had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no
longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of
our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a
right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer,
looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at
length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling
the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were
demanded for his study.

{71} Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the
moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of
improvement with his intellect. And now, as his highest effort
and inevitable development, -- as the bright and gorgeous
flower, and rich, delicious fruit of his life's labor, -- he had
produced the Unpardonable Sin! (STS, 314)

By 'producing' the Unpardonable Sin, Brand has produced himself
too, remaking himself as a man whose heart, after his final
self-immolation, is so hard as to withstand the furnace. His
long search for the Unpardonable Sin has been a wasted effort,
more pointless even than the spinnings of the dog in the story
who chases his own tail, since Brand's goal too is in himself.
Ethan Brand's activity combines all those disorders which
Hawthorne habitually analyses: individualism, isolation from
human sympathies, intellectual irresponsibility, and an
instrumental attitude to others. Brand comes to define the
Unpardonable Sin as the one he has himself practised: 'The sin
of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood
with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its
own mighty claims!' (STS, 306.)

As if to emphasize the fact that Brand's sin is a misdirected
labour, Hawthorne takes care to contrast with him the figure of
Lawyer Giles. Whereas Brand has risen from manual to
intellectual labour, Giles has gone the other way.

This poor fellow had been an attorney . . . but flip,
and sling, and toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours,
morning, noon, and night, had caused him to slide from
intellectual to various kinds and degrees of bodily labor, till
at last, to adopt his own phrase, he slid into a soap-vat. In
other words, Giles was now a soap-boiler, in a small way. He had
come to be but the fragment of a human being, a part of one foot
having been chopped off by an axe, and an entire hand torn away
by the devilish grip of a steam engine. (STS, 307)

If Ethan Brand's intellectual labour condemns him to burn in his
own kiln, Giles's manual labour dismembers him in the grip of a
mechanical devil; his soap-boiling and Brand's lime-burning both
hint at the infernal. As Leo Marx has pointed out, this macabre
vision of manual labour as dismemberment seems to arise from
Hawthorne's visit in 1838 to the new factories in the
Berkshires.7
Hawthorne addresses in 'Ethan Brand' the problem of Schiller's
fragmented humanity, {72} allegorizing that division of labour
which the Transcendentalists of Brook Farm had tried to overcome
in their Utopian schemes, under the sceptical eye of Nathaniel
Hawthorne himself.

Thanks to R. W. Emerson and his associates, the problem of
modern fragmentation as formulated in German Idealist and
Carlylean terms was to become a central preoccupation of
mid-century American writing, the novelty of the American
adventure having called forth fundamental questions about life,
labour, and human ambition in an individualist and scientific
age. Emerson's own anxiety, expressed in 'The American Scholar',
was that the advanced division of labour in modern industrial
society was fragmenting any sense of human integrity:

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered
amputation from the trunk, and strut about so manly walking
monsters, -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but
never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing into many things.
. . . The priest becomes a form; the attorney a
statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the
ship.8

This kind of Transcendentalist social criticism emphasizes both
the dismemberment of the body politic and the subordination of
men and women to their own creations, under the new reign of the
commodity. As Emerson lamented in his 'Ode Inscribed to W. E.
Channing,

'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled' --
Law for man and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.9

This running wild of the huge productive energies of the
nineteenth century, particularly in the unprecedented conquests
of nature going {73} forward in Britain and America, is a
recurrent nightmare for the mid-century writer. The feeling that
'things are in the saddle' reappears in the paradoxical
formulations of H. D. Thoreau, whose hut at Walden adjoined a
new railroad track. 'We do not ride on the railroad', Thoreau
wrote, 'it rides upon us.' Reflecting on his neighbours'
enslaved existence, he believes that 'men are not so much the
keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men', and again
that 'when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the
richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got
him'. Thoreau summarizes the incompatibility of liberty and
property by agreeing with Emerson that 'men have become the
tools of their tools'.10

The prospect which so troubled these Transcendentalist writers
was that the 'Adam' of Tom Paine's new world would turn out to
be a miscreant, and that the created wealth of the New World
would turn (or had already turned) against 'Man', its supposed
master. Instead of conquering nature, Americans would find
themselves becoming the slaves of their own products, whose
power would run wild. Frankensteinian forebodings of this kind
were prompted not just by railroads or machinery but also by
larger problems of nationhood in the United States. Another of
Emerson's Transcendentalist associates, the feminist Margaret
Fuller, applied the Frankenstein myth to the prospects of
American literature itself. Arguing against premature attempts
to synthesize a peculiarly national literature, Fuller contended
that such an achievement would have to await the further fusion
of races on the American continent and the advent of greater
leisure alongside material progress, 'national ideas shall take
birth' only then, she maintains. 'Without such ideas', Fuller
warns, 'all attempts to construct a national literature must end
in abortions like the monster of Frankenstein, things with
forms, and the instincts of forms, but soulless, and therefore
revolting.'11 Fuller's analogy is not quite
clear, but it appears to warn against assembling a literature
from the existing cultural disjecta membra available in
the United States before a unified American 'soul' has emerged.
The almost unavoidable corollary is that the United States
themselves form already a Frankenstein monster, the federal
attempt to make one from many (e pluribus unum) having
proved either {74} abortive or, at best, embryonic. America
itself might become a colossal, powerful, but alarmingly
uncontrolled creation running wild.

It is partly out of this ferment of ideas in mid-century America
that the major writings of Herman Melville emerge, and partly
too from the example of his literary hero and sometime neighbour
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville's focus of interest, like
Hawthorne's, is usually on the outcast or isolato, often
a fatherless figure doomed to wander the world. And like Emerson
and Thoreau, Melville is particularly alert to the contradictory
promise of America's new empire of productive forces: 'Seeking
to conquer a larger liberty,' he wrote, 'man but extends the
empire of necessity.' This striking aphorism appears as one of
the epigraphs to a short story, 'The Bell-Tower', in which
Melville most concisely reproduces the themes of
Frankenstein. The tale is often regarded as a reworking
of Hawthorne's 'Ethan Brand', but it is likely to have been
based also on Frankenstein, a copy of which was sent to
Melville by his publisher in 1849. The meaning of 'The
Bell-Tower' is summarized, rather too emphatically and
proverbially, in its final paragraph: 'So the blind slave
obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience, slew him. So the
creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy
for the tower. So the bell's main weakness was where man's blood
had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.'12 The pride of
the protagonist Bannadonna takes, as so often in Melville, a
phallic form: he erects a tower to house his perfect bell, but
this bell is in fact blemished by a fragment of flesh from a
foundry worker killed in anger by Bannadonna during its casting.
To chime the hours, Bannadonna secretly constructs an automaton
whose hammering action kills him. The bell later crashes down
and is finally destroyed along with the tower by an
earthquake.

Bannadonna's dream, described by Melville as Promethean and
compared with those of Albertus Magnus and Cornelius Agrippa, has been to
construct a superior creature as a helot. 'All excellences of
all God-made creatures, which served man, were here to receive
advancement, and then to be combined in one.' (BBS, 209.)
The difference from Frankenstein or Faust is, as Melville is at
pains to stress, that Bannadonna does not believe in a
mysterious secret of {75} life; he is 'a practical materialist'
(BBS, 210) aiming to achieve Frankensteinian ends by
means of applied mechanics:

In short, to solve nature, to steal into her, to intrigue beyond
her, to procure some one else to bind her to his hand; -- these,
one and all, had not been his objects; but, asking no favors
from any element or any being, of himself, to rival her,
outstrip her, and rule her. He stooped to conquer. With him,
common sense was theurgy; machinery, miracle; Prometheus, the
heroic name for machinist; man, the true God. (BBS, 210)

It is as if Melville were criticizing Frankenstein for
being too Faustian, too alchemical to be a fully modern version
of the Prometheus myth. Despite the tale's setting in
Renaissance Italy, Bannadonna's 'utilitarian ambition'
(BBS, 210) more accurately represents the
nineteenth-century Prometheanism of industry. It attempts no
romantic seduction or inveigling of Nature but an
individualistic effort of competition against her, carried on in
what Melville implies is a 'stooping' mechanical efficiency
rather than in transcendental aspiration.

Melville's response to Frankenstein is not to convert it
again into a moral fable -- although he does his worst in the
last lines of 'The Bell-Tower' -- but to outstrip it himself, to
make it both more secular and yet more potently mythical too.
The achievement of the earlier and far greater Moby Dick
follows this paradoxical pattern, representing the Prometheanism
of modern industry in almost pedantic realist reportage while at
the same time inflating it mythically into the grandest of
Titanic enterprises. Through such a paradoxical design can be
shown the larger contradictions behind the self-destructiveness
of Melville's age -- both the mechanical inventiveness of the
nineteenth century and the restless ambition which drives it.

Like Frankenstein but more ostentatiously, Melville's
Moby Dick is an assemblage and pastiche of older myths.
Most obviously, the novel recalls the myths of Job and Jonah
along with other biblical tales, and employs -- like earlier
Gothic novels -- a clearly Shakespearian tragic pattern in its
plotting. Moby Dick is an allusive omnivore, digesting
myths as remote as those of Osiris or Narcissus and as recent as
Paradise Lost or Robinson Crusoe, but among the
more prominent of the myths which the novel absorbs and reworks
is that of Prometheus. Like Victor Frankenstein, Captain Ahab
embodies both the transgressive and the creative aspects of
Prometheus, in such a contradictory manner that Captain Peleg
has to describe him as {76} 'a grand, ungodly, god-like man'
(ch. 16).13
Ahab's Promethean traits extend beyond his rebellion against
divine power to include a tormented capacity for remaking
himself, most strikingly apparent in this account of his
obsession:

. . . it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his
thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose,
by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods
and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its
own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality
to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the
unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit
that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed
from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless
somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but
without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.
God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in
thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus;
a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very
creature he creates. (ch. 44)

Ahab's obsessive purpose is seen here to be an independent
creature of his own fashioning, which now feeds upon the
remaining human elements within him. He is caught here in the
process of becoming his own self-created monster.

Ahab is of course already partly an artificial man, recognizable
by the ivory leg which is both a reminder of and a defiant
challenge to the divine malevolence he detects behind the White
Whale. In a sequence of more or less comic scenes involving the
replacement of this leg, Ahab elaborates upon the myth of
Prometheus in his dialogues with the ship's carpenter and
blacksmith, whom he nicknames 'manmaker' and 'Prometheus'
respectively (ch. 108). 'I do deem it now a most meaning thing,'
he says, 'that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they
say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire;
for what's made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so
hell's probable.' (ch. 108.) Warming to his hellish theme, Ahab
himself tries on the role of Prometheus by imagining the
creation of an artificial man:

Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man
after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his
socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs
with roots to 'em, to stay in one place; then, {77} arms three
feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and
about a quarter of fine brains; and let me see -- shall I order
eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head
to illuminate inwards. (ch. 108)

Behind the foolery here is a grandiose self-portraiture, an
enlarged projection of Ahab's own ambition, complete with its
heartlessness and its solipsism. Like the ship's surgeon and
anatomist Dr Cuticle in White-Jacket, 'a curious
patch-work of life and death, with a wig, one glass eye, and a
set of false teeth',14 Ahab's willed resistance to common
human sympathies has refashioned him as an artificial being, the
creature and plaything of his own monomania. He is both sides of
the Promethean creation at once, both obsessed creator and
outcast creature.

To emphasize his Promethean role Ahab becomes a blacksmith
himself and forges his own harpoon, which we foresee will bring
about his death ('have I been but forging my own branding-iron,
then?'), baptizing it in the name of the Devil (ch. 113). He has
already described himself as an iron artefact, indeed as the
all-conquering and world-embracing railroad engine. 'The path to
my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is
grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts
of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's
an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!' (ch. 37.)
Beneath this expansionist brag lies an ironic admission that
Ahab has re-created himself in the image of a mechanical beast
of burden, enslaving himself to what he imagines is a conquest
of nature. Ahab's Promethean self-making is both heroic and
pathetic, for in seeking a larger liberty he has but extended
the realm of necessity.

Victor Frankenstein's first disciple is a navigator, Robert
Walton, who attempts with Frankenstein's help to inspire his
crew to complete a dangerous voyage. He is saved from the
consequences of his ambition by the threat of mutiny by his
sailors, who have been recruited, as it happens, from whaling
ships. Moby Dick can be read as a study of what happens
when the crew fails to mutiny against Frankensteinian
leadership. The crew of the Pequod allows itself to be
welded into another instrument of Ahab's mania. The old captain
regards the mentality of his sailors as that of the
'manufactured man' (ch. 46), while in the preparations for the
final chase the men around {78} him appear to Ishmael as if
their human feelings had been 'ground to finest dust, and
powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron
soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever
conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them.' (ch. 130.)
Melville had explained in White-Jacket that a ship's
captain regards his subordinates as 'disintegrated parts of
himself, detached from the main body';15 Ahab has remade from such parts a
disciplined organic instrument subordinate to his will. As he
exclaims at the climax of the chase, 'Ye are not other men, but
my arms and legs; and so obey me.' (ch. 134.)

Animated by Ahab's controlling will the arms and legs of the
crew, and their separate racial and personal identities, are
brought together to compose a floating body politic.

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held
them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things
-- oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp --
yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull,
which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long
central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this
man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to
that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
(ch. 134)

It is the crew as a whole which is the 'manufactured man' shaped
by Ahab in his role as the Prometheus of nineteenth-century
industry. The crew is deliberately and allegorically presented
to us as a medley of different races and temperaments, all of
its members being islanders, individualists, and
isolatoes. 'Yet now, federated along one keel, what a
set these Isolatoes were!' (ch. 27.) They stand, in short, for
the federated American republic, afloat upon Melville's
allegorical waters. But they do not form a federation of equals;
the red man, the brown man, and the black boy are all mere
instruments subordinate to the white captain and his white
obsession. The nineteenth-century American whaling ship, as H.
Bruce Franklin reminds us,16 combined many of the worst
features of Northern wage-slavery with those of Southern
chattel-slavery, driving its victims -- Melville included -- to
desertion or mutiny.

That reactionary relapse into concealed feudal tyrannies
imagined in Gothic novels is also the concern of Moby
Dick, which envisages {79} the possibility of America's
federated parts being reassembled in the service of a guiding
principle -- a 'keel' -- both oppressive and self-destructive.
The danger is the same as that announced in White-Jacket:
a "monstrous grafting of tyranny upon freedom'.17 The
individuals or isolatoes of the Pequod's crew
succumb to a Shakespearian rhetoric and to a resurgent European
mode of hierarchy in which Ahab galvanizes them through 'the
Leyden jar of his own magnetic life' (ch. 36). Rather than
squeeze hands in that democratic brotherhood dreamed of by
Ishmael, they surrender their destinies to a 'head' who turns
them into mere arms and legs. Since Ahab is waging war against
Nature in the shape of the White Whale, he requires a prior
conquest over his men; called into life as a collective
instrument, their task is to suffer for their captain's
transgression. While Ahab attempts to subdue Nature, pursuing
her to her hiding-places like Frankenstein (F, 49/54), the crew is expected to
suffer the consequences. The fate of the Pequod asks us
to question the logic of industrial development stirring into
life in America and across 'the all-grasping western world' (ch.
87).

Read in a Frankensteinian perspective, Moby Dick can be
seen to harbour three monsters: the dehumanized Ahab, the
'manufactured man' which is the crew, and finally the White
Whale itself. Moby Dick is frequently referred to as a monster,
often simply because of his huge size and destructive capacity,
but he has other claims to the title. In the episode of 'The
Spirit-Spout', Ishmael and the rest of the crew sense a
malevolence in the whale's appearance, 'as if it were
treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster
might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest
and most savage seas' (ch. 51). This ambiguous point at which
the quarry becomes a trapper and the hunter becomes the hunted
is precisely that of Frankenstein's closing episodes, in
which the monster appears to flee Victor but leaves him food and
directions in order to lure him to the Arctic. In both novels
the effect of the confusion between pursuer and pursued is to
cast the antagonists as twin 'moments' within a single
self-destructive complex, in which revenge can be revealed as
suicide and heroism as folly pursuing its own tail. As in
Caleb Williams and Frankenstein, the quest turns
in upon statically, and the antagonists of Moby Dick
confront one another as mirror images. That the White Whale
acts, or at least appears {80} to the Puritan paranoiac, as
Ahab's 'double' has often been remarked by readers of Moby
Dick; the two share the same wrinkled brow and the same
solitary and maimed grandeur. Yet their equivalence is
ultimately a figment of Ahab's obsessed mind: as a white whale,
Ahab's quarry is simply a whale, a dumb brute, but as Moby Dick
-- humanly named and adorned with legend -- he becomes a
'monster', apparently wilful in provoking and mocking Ahab's
urge to subdue Nature.

If the monstrous quality of the White Whale is a projection of
Ahab's persecution mania, then it should come as no surprise to
find Ahab blending into this mirror image, and becoming a
vengeful monster himself. On the other hand the whale, with the
help of Ishmael's bragging cetology, appears in heroic guise,
and even as an inscrutable divinity towards whom Ahab is acting
as a presumptuous blasphemer. By the end of the story Moby Dick
has become a fully American hero by resisting and eluding the
Europeanized tyranny of Ahab's monomania. His human counterpart
and panegyrist Ishmael also slips away from the despotic
nightmare and offers through his narrative a fraternal and
pastoral alternative to Ahab's lust for conquest. The whale is a
mute 'monster', but he is given a displaced voice through his
advocate Ishmael, a virtuoso of rhetorical energy and style.
Between them, these two survivors offer the dialogical rebuttal
of Ahab's obsession, as the monster does to Victor's. Goaded
into self-defence, the whale remains innocent because dumb;
forced to become, in human eyes, a 'monster', he is never truly
part of the human world. His articulate equivalent is Ishmael, a
fellow-victim and outcast orphan, while the true monster is the
Frankensteinian figure of Ahab himself, dismembered, unnaturally
vengeful, self-enslaved, and self-exiled from land and from
women.

Even more than Frankenstein, Moby Dick is a novel
which excludes women from its action, yet it manages similarly,
if less pointedly, to problematize the masculine heroism which
its setting isolates. Melville's men appear to be redeemed to
the extent that they are feminized: Ishmael and Queequeg are
seen to be bound together in what is almost a parody of the
marriage-bed and its harmony, and they are later 'wedded' by the
monkey-rope, while Queequeg acts as a 'midwife' to Tashtego. By
contrast, Ahab's regime aboard the Pequod bristles with
phallic menace. Only in the chapter entitled 'The Symphony' does
his rigour unbend as he observes the sexualized {81} heavings of
sea and sky. Here he admits to Starbuck that his forty years at
sea have been a 'desolation of solitude'. For the first time,
Ahab mentions

that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape
Horn the next flay, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow
-- wife? wife? -- rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I
widowed that poor girl when I married her,
Starbuck. . . (ch. 132)

The image of his wife and child which he sees in Starbuck's eye
is the last lifeline by which Ahab could pull himself back to
his 'humanities'. In rejecting it, he joins Victor Frankenstein,
Elis Frobom, and Hawthorne's transgressors as another victim of
industrial sublimation.

The earliest and most outspoken champions of the modern Melville
revival rightly stressed the connections between Moby
Dick and the dynamic energies of territorial and industrial
expansion in mid-century America. Both D. H. Lawrence in
Studies in Classic American Literature and Charles Olson
in Call Me Ishmael read the Pequod as an image of
American industry, and Ahab as the white American urge to subdue
Nature by mechanical efficiency. Many critics have seen Ahab as
a latter-day Faust, but Olson recognizes that after the
industrial revolution Faust could never be the same again.18 Faust has
become Prometheanized; and in the nineteenth-century world of
industrial development, transgression and damnation have become
identified less with devilry than with production. The world of
Moby Dick is no alchemical laboratory but an authentic
and exhaustively catalogued American whaling ship setting out to
convert real spermaceti and blubber into dollars for its owners.
The problem of defining Ahab's transgression, however, is that
his project is not simply an over-reaching extension of
capitalist enterprise as such; on the contrary, it appears to be
a hijacking or usurpation of the Pequod for private
purposes at odds with those of mundane profit-making. As in 'The
Mines at Falun', it is the conversion of the industrial into a
route to 'higher' goals which proves fatal.

Starbuck, the pious and (as his name suggests) dollar-orientated
first mate, voices the horror of the respectable New England
bourgeois at Ahab's motives.

I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too,
Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we
follow; but I came here to {82} hunt whales, not my commander's
vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even
if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in
our Nantucket market. (ch. 36)

Ahab scorns this as an accountant's view of the world, and it is
only then that Starbuck resorts to moral objections, condemning
Ahab's pursuit as blasphemous. From the point of view of the
Pequod's owners, Ahab is a profitable instrument who has
now rebelled in pursuit of his own higher goal, diverting the
lucrative resources of the crew and the ship towards the
symbolic conquest of Nature's malevolence in the shape of the
White Whale. Yet Starbuck, the loyal representative of the
company's interests, is forced nevertheless to obey the man to
whom the supreme powers of captain and industrial manager have
been delegated. Ahab's maritime coup d'etat may be
illegal, but to the impotent Starbuck it is also irresistible,
because all he can offer the crew, in competition with Ahab's
inspiring heroic purpose, is a frugal and drily legalistic
accountancy. Melville is, in effect, enquiring into the
possibility that simple capitalist enterprise can harbour within
it -- in its acquisitive mentality, in its forms of
labour-discipline and delegated power -- tendencies towards
untrammelled despotism and destructive energy which its sober
guardians are powerless to resist once they are unleashed.

The good Quakers of Nantucket are obliged by the law of the
market to employ heathen harpooners and a satanic captain,
because their labour is more productive. Once out of their
sight, though, the Quakers' ship becomes a weapon to strike at
their own God in open rebellion. Starbuck seems quite unprepared
for this transformation, having failed to discern beneath the
Pequod's innocent commercial status a power susceptible
to irrational development. What Ahab's usurpation represents is
the subordination of simple commercial transactions to an
underlying thirst for capital accumulation, an
uncontrolled expansionist drive which uses each transaction or
productive act merely as a step to the next. This process was
still very much a mystery even to those who were most eagerly
practising it, and so it can only be represented symbolically,
in the somewhat lurid and melodramatic terms of biblical or
Shakespearian vengeance, in pseudo-Masonic rituals and other
codes incompatible with Starbuck's mercantile common sense. Even
Ahab cannot understand the nature of the force which drives him;
like Queequeg, who cannot decipher the hieroglyphs tattooed upon
his own skin, the captain is inscrutable to himself.

{83} What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is
it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel,
remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural
lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and
jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do
what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as
dare? is Ahab, Ahab? (ch. 132)

Never stably identical with himself, Ahab is indeed not Ahab but
the instrument of an accumulative frenzy which grips
nineteenth-century industry, possessing the possessor and
commanding the commander. Ahab's combination of technical
efficiency with general loss of control and purpose, of
localized tyranny with generalized anarchy, encapsulates
perfectly the very logic of capitalist accumulation and
expansion: 'all my means are sane,' he realizes, 'my motive and
my object mad.' (ch. 41.)19

The singular achievement of Moby Dick is now generally
acknowledged as an unprecedented combination of high tragic
dignity and mythological resonance with the meticulous, even
pedantic realism of reportage, in which Melville plays off Ahab
the mythic quester and tragedian against Ishmael the
encyclopaedic cetologist and practical mariner. The novel's
divergent registers somehow balance one another, the central
chapters on the parts and dimensions of the whale and on the
bloody details of its exploitation serving as a 'ballast' -- as
many critics have expressed it -- to the symbolic and
metaphysical soaring which is the book's counter-movement. This
cetological material holds what would otherwise be
transcendental freewheeling down to the observable facts of the
nineteenth-century world, while on the other hand the
anatomizing of the whale and the inventory of the ship are
lifted and propelled beyond the merely documentary by the
impetus of the book's mythic, symbolic, and romance elements.
Yoked together in Moby Dick are two contrary impulses --
of documentary realism and of symbolic romance -- which tend to
pull in opposite directions throughout the history of the novel
form, and whose magnetic repulsion was especially powerful in
the nineteenth century as an ugly, urbanized, industrial world
proved increasingly indigestible to the traditions of literary
romance.

{84} Melville's ability thus to digest fictionally the hard
facts of nineteenth-century industry relies to a great extent on
his use of transgression myths -- those of Frankenstein and
Faust, with the stories of Ethan Brand and others -- as the
foundation for Moby Dick's design and narrative movement.
It is the mobilization of such myths which gives the novel a
means (perhaps the only means) of grasping imaginatively the new
complexities of the modern world and especially the motive
forces of industrial expansion, forces whose impersonal and
invisible movements concealed themselves behind the phenomena
they produced and which were therefore not readily accessible to
realist representation. Melville's resort to myth in Moby
Dick is not an atavistic invocation of primeval archetypes
but a remarkably modern effort to dramatize the dynamics of
nineteenth-century industrial expansion.

In many respects the achievement of Moby Dick invites
comparison with that of a contemporary work which also attempts
to assimilate romance and industrial life: Elizabeth Gaskell's
Mary Barton. According to Gaskell's preface, this novel
was born from the realization of 'how deep might be the romance
in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy
streets of the town in which I resided'.20 The strength of its earlier
chapters lies in a realist commitment to reproducing the speech,
manners, domestic environment, and personal histories of the
Manchester factory-workers and their families. Yet along with
this element in Mary Barton goes an element of romance,
of the kind which rapidly curdles into melodrama. These two
sides of the novel sit so uneasily together that it is almost
possible to divide Mary Barton into a first half of
powerful and sympathetic reportage and a second half of
melodramatic degeneration. The crucial dividing line falls, very
significantly, across the discussion in Chapter 15 of John
Barton's support for Chartism.

Gaskell had originally intended John Barton to be the hero of
the novel and the central object of our sympathies but, partly
under her publishers' pressure and partly because of her own
problems with the character, she discarded this plan as the book
took shape. The first part of Mary Barton tries to lead
readers to understand the disaffection and protests of workers
like John Barton, but it reaches {85} a conclusion and a crisis
of a kind which obliges Gaskell to dislodge this character from
the centre of sympathy and to substitute for him his daughter
Mary, who takes over as the beautiful romance heroine. The
discarding of John Barton is a rapid and even spectacular
operation: he becomes an opium addict, a Chartist, and a
trade-unionist in quick (and, we are left to infer, logical)
succession. Gaskell's commentary reveals several of her motives
for the sudden change of direction: [ILLUSTRATION!!!]

{86} John Barton's overpowering thought, which was to work out
his fate on earth, was rich and poor; why are they so separate,
so distinct, when God has made them all? It is not His will,
that their interests are so far apart. Whose doing is it?

And so on into the problems and mysteries of life, until,
bewildered and lost, unhappy and suffering, the only feeling
that remained clear and undisturbed in the tumult of his heart,
was hatred to the one class and keen sympathy with the other.

But what availed his sympathy? No education had given him
wisdom; and without wisdom, even love, with all its effects, too
often works but harm. He acted to the best of his judgement, but
it was a widely-erring judgement.

The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of
Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted
with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and
evil.

The people rise up to life; they irritate us, they terrify us,
and we become their enemies. Then, in the sorrowful moment of
our triumphant power, their eyes gaze on us with a mute
reproach. Why have we made them what they are; a powerful
monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness?
(MB, 219)

In a novel which offers a considered response to the sufferings
of the Manchester workers, and an effort to sympathize with
them, such a passage has considerable significance. It is the
point at which a class at first represented as suffering
passively now 'rises up into life' in protest, and has therefore
to be distanced and reinterpreted as a monster, strong but
childishly misguided. The working class now becomes 'the
uneducated'; at the moment when it tries to overcome its
subordination it has to be told that its actions are based upon
a fundamental ignorance of Manchester Political Economy and its
eternal truths: 'Distrust each other as they may, the employers
and employed must rise or fall together. There may be some
difference as to chronology, none as to fact.' (MB,
221.)21

In Gaskell's allusion to Frankenstein we have a prominent
example of a creative misreading which wrenches the myth into
new patterns {87} while applying it directly to the central
tensions of an industrializing social order. The misreading here
is more than just a matter of calling the monster by the name of
his maker; it brings in too the stage versions' redefinition of
the monster as a soulless being and as an inarticulate child.
This allows Gaskell to represent the working class as an
unfortunate but morally irresponsible creature which lashes out
blindly and mutely at its begetter in the deluded belief that
the employers are in some way to blame for its misery. It is no
more human than Mary Wollstonecraft's blind elephant, although
Gaskell does allow it the charitable condescension due to a
child. If the employers are to blame, it is, according to
Gaskell, only for failing to provide their workers with 'soul'
in the form of religious example, and with an education which
could explain that their miseries are the necessary consequences
of immutable market forces, their prosperity tied forever to
that of their masters. The repeated refrain which Gaskell
raises against working-class violence in Mary Barton is
'They know not what they do' (MB, 223,439). What begins
as an account of the sufferings of the working class ends by
equating the passion of the crucified Christ with that of the
Manchester bourgeoisie.22

In this extraordinary series of mythological displacements
Gaskell herself manages to double up as both Victor Frankenstein
and Pontius Pilate. While her intended message in Mary
Barton is one of sympathy and brotherhood, ironically she
comes to wash her hands of her proletarian hero and to recoil
from him as a monster when he appears to be asserting his
independence from his employers and from his literary creator.
Gaskell enacts, in other words, the same repudiation of the
monster and his claims of which Victor Frankenstein had been
guilty. She accompanies this gesture with a litany of
disclaimers on behalf of the employers' class, shifting
responsibility to the eternal laws of supply and demand, which
her ideology identifies in turn with the injunctions of
Christian charity: when it is weak and incapable, the working
class deserves pious sympathy, but when it is in a position to
assert itself, it is to be reviled as a monstrous beast. The
result is that just when John Barton is about to transform
himself from passive victim to articulate champion of his class,
Gaskell has to drug him and turn him into {88} a mute and
vengeful monster. His form of class resistance is narrowed into
a personal grudge and dramatized as the reflex savagery of an
inarticulate assassin. Mary Barton falls asunder into
reportage on the one side and lurid melodrama on the other,
split apart by Gaskell's recoiling from and silencing of the
working-class monster.

That Melville is able to overcome the danger of such a split in
Moby Dick, that he can mythicize the everyday reality of
the whaling industry while preserving its authenticity, can be
attributed ultimately to his radical-democratic reinterpretation
of the grand style and of tragic propriety.

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I
shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round
them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the
most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the
exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman's arm with some
ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous
set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it,
thou just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle
of humanity over all my kind! (ch. 26.)

Melville is able to elevate his mariners in this way because he
believes in their 'democratic dignity', and because he himself
has been formed by their experiences, viewing the world of his
novels from the forecastle rather than from the bridge. It is
not just that, as a matter of their personal experience,
Melville was able to describe actual labour whereas Gaskell --
along with other misnamed 'industrial' novelists in Britain --
could give us only the domestic sickbed or the riot at the
factory gates. It is also a matter of instinctive
identifications: unlike Gaskell, Melville has no occasion to
recoil from his 'monsters', the crew and the whale. His
impatience with the anti-democratic rhetoric of popular
monstrosity is highlighted in the repartee of his idealized
mariner Jack Chase in White-Jacket. The ship's poetaster
Lemsford bewails the philistinism of a public which ignores
him:

'Blast them, Jack, what they call the public is a monster, like
the idol we saw in Owhyhee, with the head of a jackass, the body
of a baboon, and the tail of a scorpion!'

'I don't like that,' said Jack; 'when I'm ashore, I myself am
part of the public.'23

The difference is resolved by an evasive distinction between
public and people, but Melville's democratic reservation still
stands, signalling {89} his suspicion of the traditionally
reactionary uses to which the 'monstrous' has been put, and
reminding us of his own place within the monstrous body of
democracy. Himself a renegade, castaway, and deserter, Melville
can give the outcasts and victims of industrial Prometheanism a
human voice, while Gaskell silences them or relegates them to a
faltering infancy.

The point at which Elizabeth Gaskell transforms her workers from
reasonable beings into Gothic banditti in Mary Barton has
a certain ironic significance. During the negotiations between
the employers and a trade union delegation, Mary's prospective
seducer Harry Carson vigorously opposes the workers' right to
organize, and scribbles a caricature of the lean and hungry
delegates for the amusement of his fellow-capitalists. This
cartoon is later picked up by one of the workmen, and it
inflames them to the point of drawing lots for Carson's
assassination. Although we are meant to take Carson's
caricature as another sign of his callous insensitivity, a
portrayal of the workers of just the kind that Gaskell wants to
supersede in her own work, it comes instead to set the tone of
Gaskell's subsequent treatment of her workers: in her portrayal
of working-class organization as a murderous conspiracy Gaskell
herself degenerates into literary 'caricature'. Such
contradictions in her treatment of the working class revolve
around the ambivalence of her central and repeated insistence
upon the mutual dependence between masters and men. As it
appears in her other 'industrial' novel, North and South,
Gaskell's argument formulates a Christian paternalist
qualification to the laissez-faire doctrines of
Manchester: Margaret Hale tells the employer Thornton that 'the
most isolated of your Darkshire Egos has dependants clinging to
him on all sides; he cannot shake them off. . .'24 Through her
heroine Gaskell espouses here what could be called the official
morality of the Victorian novel, chiding liberal individualism
in the name of social responsibility. But the reminder of
Christian brotherhood has its more sinister underside, which
Gaskell's appeal to the Frankenstein myth in Mary Barton
brings into focus. For if the capitalists truly cannot shake off
the terrifying power which they have brought into being (and
since they live off its labour, they cannot) then they are
saddled, like Victor Frankenstein, with a threatening monster
who will never leave them in peace. Gaskell's [ILLUSTRATION!!!]
{91} use of the Frankenstein myth announces the awful
recognition by the Victorian bourgeoisie that its prosperity is
inescapably haunted.

It is this indelible historical fear that Harry Carson's
professional counterparts -- the cartoonists of the Victorian
press -- play upon in their adaptations of Frankenstein's
monster. True to the older traditions of the monstrous as a
visible vice, they depict in their political allegories a
creature who embodies pure brutal menace. The most vicious of
their caricatures were reserved for the Irish nationalists,
always regarded in Britain as mindless and primitive brutes; but
the Frankenstein myth also appears in cartoons which depict the
sometimes linked threat of the British working class, as in
Tenniel's 'The Brummagem Frankenstein'. Tenniel preserved in his
two Frankenstein cartoons the Burkean prophecy which warns that
middle-class radicals (here, the Irish nationalist Charles
Stewart Parnell and the Liberal orator John Bright) will surely
be overwhelmed by the uncontrollable masses they incite.
Frankenstein had come to stand as the reflected image of the
Victorian bourgeois order as it faced nervously the Irish and
the working class stirring into independent political life.

19. Melville was of course not a Marxist but a
radical democrat of a sceptical disposition. However, the common
objection to Marxist readings of Moby Dick -- that
Melville also celebrates capitalist industry's heroic
achievements as well as condemning its recklessness -- is quite
misplaced, since the same is true of Marx and Engels themselves
in their Communist Manifesto.

21. Despite such confident expositions of
economic fact against the childish imaginings of the workers,
Gaskell claims in her Preface that she knows 'nothing of
Political Economy, or the theories of trade' (MB, 38),
soon after remarking upon the 'unhappy state of things between
those so bound to each other by common interests, as the
employers and the employed must ever be' (MB, 37). The
illusion of disinterestedness here in taking for granted the
common interest of contending classes is a perfect instance of
ideological blindness.

22. Cf. the inverted pieta which Gaskell
contrives at the end of the riot scene in Chapter 22 of her
North and South.